Falling in Love with Photography

Throughout my time at Marine Dynamics, I had the chance to experience numerous exciting activities, including BRUV deployments, fishing, and working on the Shark cage diving and Whale watching boats. However, one of my all-time favourite experiences was photography.

During my first week of the internship, I had a lecture that focused on understanding the features of the DSLR camera, including how to adjust the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO when the camera was in manual mode. All these settings need to be adjusted depending on what you photograph and how bright it is. 

The skills learned during this lecture were practiced on the Marine Big 5 tours, as it gives you plenty of opportunities to take photos of a vast number of wildlife. When I snapped my first photo of a mother and calf Southern Right Whale, I fell in love with photography and took every opportunity to take pictures.

While I took some incredible pictures on the camera that I learned through Marine Dynamics, I knew I had been searching for one specific moment to capture on my camera from the beginning of my internship: A whale tail.

And I finally captured it…Twice in my final week at Marine dynamics.

While photography is wonderful, it is also an incredibly helpful scientific tool. For example, it can be used as an identification tool, Southern Right whales have rough patches on their faces known as callosities; these callosities can be used to identify specific individuals and allows researchers to follow specific whales throughout their lives.